John Bruce looks after Celtic’s Ecommerce systems at the Clubs stadium headquarters in the east end of Glasgow.
At this week’s Ecommerce Club meeting he provided a fascinating talk about the club’s journey to help fans purchase products and keep up to date about what’s going on with the team.
John explained how Celtic, like the majority of clubs across the UK, had originally outsourced it’s entire ecommerce operations to a third party. John had been a key figure in helping make a case to bring these core operations back inside the club. The club made the bold decision to implement the plan to take control of its online operations and the results have been spectacular. Today, a few specialist services are still outsourced. The main strategy and control resides, literally, under the stadium alongside where the clubs products are warehoused and dispatched. Not only is the club making a lot more money through selling club merchandise, the site can quickly react to events in the team and at the park.
In addition to the excellent main talk, there were significant discussions around the use of Amazon and the problems caused to brands by fake products.
An important takeaway message was that for the diverse companies in the room, it was remarkable that the same set of issues applied across most sectors and most sizes of company.
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